Innovation Ohio

What you need to know about Ohio Politics and Policy

  • 2022 Ohio Election Hub
  • About Us
    • Our Mission & Role
    • Our Team
    • Job Opportunities
  • Our Work
    • 2022 Ohio Election Hub
  • The Latest
    • Updates
    • IO in the News
    • 2022 Ohio Election Hub
    • 2022 Legislative Scorecard: House Representatives
  • Take Action
  • Donate

Mar 03 2020

The money and interests targeting Ohio’s legislature and Supreme Court in 2020

By Tyler Buchanan – Originally published February 17, 2020 in the Ohio Capital Journal

It’s not an understatement to say this November’s General Election will have monstrous implications.

Everything comes to a head in this 2020 cycle: the legislatures, the courts, the census, control of the new redistricting effort and a presidential race sure to bring immense turnout this fall. 

As such, both political parties are doing everything they can in Ohio to ensure a successful November at the polls. Republicans want to maintain their power in the legislature and the courts. Democrats want to take hold of the courts for the first time in decades and put an end to partisan gerrymandering.

Various Republican and Democratic groups are targeting Ohio with political power — current and in the future — on the line. 

Major political interests, from charter schools to energy companies, are pouring vast sums of money into these efforts, reporting from the Capital Journal finds. 

GOP fighting to maintain control

The Republican Party sees the Ohio Supreme Court as an important cog in its effort to maintain political control. The outcome of two judicial  elections this November may have a wider impact on state politics.

This is why: Ohio’s legislative districts are redrawn after each decennial census. In 2018, voters here approved a new process in which the new map will be drawn by the state legislature. The map will require bipartisan support in order to be adopted, or else a separate Ohio Redistricting Commission will draw and approve the districts. 

Republicans have supermajorities (more than 60 percent representation) in both the Ohio House and Senate. Their hold on the chambers is unlikely to be challenged in this year’s elections, meaning the GOP will have a heavy hand in drawing the new map.

If there is a resulting legal battle stemming from this redistricting process, the Ohio Supreme Court may get involved. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that partisan gerrymandering is an issue best adjudicated by state supreme courts.  

To have a majority in both the Statehouse and the Ohio Supreme Court would give Republicans control of both ends of the process. 

The Ohio Supreme Court building in Downtown Columbus

The Republican State Leadership Committee, an organization focused on down-ballot races at the state level, has several initiatives related to this effort.

RSLC’s Judicial Fairness Initiative specifically deals with state courts and previously named Ohio a target state in 2014 and 2016. 

The leadership committee and its Judicial Fairness Initiative have each spent a considerable sum with FlexPoint Media, a New Albany company. In total, FlexPoint Media received around $900,000 to conduct “media placement” work. The company is led by Tim Cameron, a former Republican strategist who once worked for a Super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich’s 2012 presidential campaign.

(That $900,000 expenditure followed a $5,000 contribution by FlexPoint to the RSLC in early 2019, a return on investment approaching 18,000%.)

Another RSLC initiative known as Right Lines GOP is focused on winning state legislatures ahead of the impending redistricting efforts. 

The Buckeye State is among 14 across the country being targeted by Right Lines GOP.  

“Our Party’s success nationally depends on our Party’s success in the states,” its website notes.

RSLC conducted a similar campaign a decade ago for the 2010 redistricting cycle known as REDMAP.

The 2020 effort features a “Speakers Advisory Council” of former U.S. House Speakers Paul Ryan, John Boehner and Newt Gingrich. Ryan’s involvement led to criticism from the largest newspaper in his home state of Wisconsin, which wrote in an editorial that Ryan is “doubling down on gerrymandering that has helped his GOP.”

The impact of gerrymandering

Ohio gerrymandering has unquestionably favored Republican candidates over the past decade. 

Ohio's gerrymandered congressional map, enacted in 2011, which inordinately favors Republicans.
Ohio’s congressional map is drawn to heavily favor Republicans

To use the 2018 elections as an example, Republicans did receive the most total votes in Ohio’s 16 Congressional districts: 52 to 47 percent. That resulted in the GOP earning 12 seats to the Democrats’ four. 

The districts are drawn to produce an entrenched, unshakable lead for the political parties in their respectively held districts. In the 2014, 2016 and 2018 elections combined, only two out of 48 Congressional races in Ohio were decided within a 10 percent margin. 

There has not been a flipped district in a decade, because of how compacted Democratic and Republican voters are placed in these Ohio districts.

Who is funding these GOP initiatives?

The Republican State Leadership Committee brings in tens of millions of dollars per year in contributions. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks political spending, RSLC raised well over $40 million in the 2018 election cycle. With so much on the line in 2020, a host of major corporations and right-leaning donors have donated to RSLC this cycle. 

Koch Industries and interests connected to Las Vegas businessman Sheldon Adelson have been major donors to RSLC over the past decade, as have companies such as Amazon, Wal-Mart, Paypal, NASCAR, Coca-Cola, Monsanto and Raytheon. 

In Ohio, top donors include Marathon Petroleum based in Findlay ($201,000 in 2019); Anthem based in Cincinnati (also $201,000); and AT&T Services ($50,000). 

Others with an interest in having a friendly Ohio Supreme Court and Ohio Statehouse have also contributed money to RSLC over the years.  

This includes FirstEnergy Corporation, which has donated $160,000 since 2006. FirstEnergy was involved in a legal dispute last year which led to the Ohio Supreme Court ruling that a charge FirstEnergy had imposed on customers was improper. The Court later ruled 6-1 against a motion to reconsider, with one Republican justice dissenting. That was Sharon Kennedy, whose reelection effort will be bolstered by the RSLC’s Judicial Fairness Initiative. 

FirstEnergy was able to keep the hundreds of millions of dollars it had imposed on customers prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling.

FirstEnergy also has interest in keeping the Statehouse’s status quo. The corporation benefited in 2019 from the signing of House Bill 6, which subsidizes several of its power plants to the tune of $150 million per year.  

The charter school industry also features high-profile supporters of RSLC. K12 Management Inc., a for-profit online charter school company, has donated more than $300,000 to the committee over the past decade, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

K12 operates the Ohio Virtual Academy, which became the largest online charter school in the state following ECOT’s demise in early 2018. The charter benefited when it convinced lawmakers not to punish Ohio Virtual Academy for poor academic scores of former ECOT students.  

One of the biggest financial supporters of K12 Management is the DeVos family. The most well-known is Betsy DeVos, who now serves as the U.S. Secretary of Education. Her husband, Richard DeVos Jr., and his three siblings, Doug, Daniel and Suzanne, are big supporters of RSLC as well — the four have donated $1.15 million to the committee since 2015. 

Dem group working to position party for redistricting

The Democratic Party is also focusing its sights on Ohio, though in narrower fashion and with far less money than the Republicans.

The National Democratic Redistricting Committee is led by Eric Holder, who served as attorney general under President Barack Obama. NDRC is targeting 12 states this election cycle.

According to a filing with the IRS, the committee’s purpose is to “build a comprehensive plan to favorably position Democrats for the redistricting process through 2022.”

NDRC plans to spend millions of dollars on state legislative and judicial elections over the next nine months, though it only plans to spend a small amount in Ohio. 

Each of the committee’s 12 target states outline different focuses; in Ohio, NDRC will only be supporting the House of Representatives. Republicans hold a 61-38 advantage in the House, meaning it will almost certainly have the upper hand in the map design process next year. 

Still, the process will require at least 50 percent support from the minority party in each chamber. 

“(A)n increase in Democratic Party representation in the legislature will help ensure more bipartisan map-drawing process,” an NDRC news release states. 

The news release, publicized on Friday, outlines just over $33,000 in Ohio spending. This includes around $20,000 in spending to the Ohio House Democratic Caucus and another $13,300 to House Minority Leader Emilia Sykes, D-Akron. 

NDRC has far less corporate support than its Republican counterpart, but several well-known donors have donated in the past few years. This includes George Soros, who contributed $2.6 million to the committee in 2018, an IRS filing shows. 

Ohio Democrats are hoping to flip the Supreme Court, eat into Republicans’ Statehouse control and deliver a win to their party’s presidential nominee. Republicans, with a political and financial advantage headed into the remainder of 2020, hope to maintain power as the redistricting process approaches. 

It will all come down to Nov. 3, 2020.

Written by admin · Categorized: 2020 Election, Democracy · Tagged: Ohio Supreme Court, Redistricting

Jan 25 2013

National Election Trend Coming to Ohio?

Currently, if a presidential candidate wins a state’s popular vote the winner also receives all of the state’s Electoral College votes.  The only exceptions to this rule are Nebraska and Maine. However, after losing two presidential elections in a row, Republican lawmakers across the nation are attempting to change this in their respective states. In several Republican-controlled legislatures in states that supported President Barack Obama there are legislative initiatives to award their state’s Electoral College votes based on congressional district.  This plan takes advantage of the fact that the GOP has successfully gerrymandered districts in key blue states. A recent analysis by the Center for American Progress shows that had this election rigging plan been in place in 2012, Mitt Romney would be in the White House, despite Obama capturing the popular vote. Ohio is ripe for this type of effort. Republicans control the governor’s office and both houses of the Ohio General Assembly. Due to this control – and the way Ohio reapportions state and federal legislative districts every ten years – for the second decade in a row Ohio’s General Assembly and congressional districts have been drawn along hyper-partisan lines. While Ohioans voted to elect Obama in the last election and statewide voting totals for Democratic candidates exceeded GOP totals, Ohio’s congressional seats are split roughly 75/25 in favor of the GOP and statehouse seats are no better. The idea to change Electoral College rules in the states is gaining momentum. Earlier this month Reince Priebus, Chairman of the RNC, voiced support.  Legislation to divide electoral votes has been introduced in Michigan and Virginia.  In Virginia this legislation has been voted out of committee. Pennsylvania Senate Republican Leader Pileggi has renewed efforts to pass such legislation in his state. Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin has said it is an “interesting idea.” This fall, shortly after the election, Secretary of State Jon Husted suggested that he supports the idea of splitting the Electoral College votes in Ohio.  Will John Husted bring this alarming national trend to Ohio? Husted said:
“You’re never going to fix the elections process in Ohio as long as we are the most important swing state in the country…. The way that you could minimize that is that you could fix redistricting so that we had fair Congressional districts and then you could apportion all of our electoral votes according to Congressional district so that it wouldn’t be a winner take all state. And if you did that you would take the importance of Ohio out of this and all of those elections problems would go away”
While he later backtracked and said this was just a comment, not a proposal, it may just be a matter of time before similar legislation finds its way to Ohio. As for fair congressional districts in Ohio, we know what the GOP really thinks of that idea. In the lame duck session of the last General Assembly there was a brief bipartisan effort to work on a more fair way to redistrict after every decennial census. There were two major roadblocks: House Speaker Bill Batchelder (a Republican) and general Republican refusal to consider any bill that would take effect before the next U.S. Census – in 2020.

Written by jenny · Categorized: Innovation Station · Tagged: Bill Batchelder, Electoral College, Jon Husted, Ohio Politics, Redistricting

Jan 17 2013

Insider: Congressional Republicans think they can do this for “the next decade”

Redistricting woes not just an Ohio problem

Stan Collender is a Roll Call columnist and longtime Washington insider in the public and private sector. In a blog post, Collender tells us this about GOP threats to hold America hostage via the debt ceiling:
But it would be wrong to dismiss it out of hand. From the conversations I’ve had with Republicans House members and staff since the 2012 election, the threats, are real and make a great deal of political sense no matter how obnoxious and damaging it otherwise would be. The key is the new House GOP politics of this decade. I’ve repeatedly been told that, with redistricting in place, House Republicans are relatively certain they’ll be able to maintain the majority at least through the end of this decade if they continue to appeal to the GOP base in their congressional districts.
[Read more…]

Written by ronsylvester · Categorized: Fair and Open Elections, Innovation Station · Tagged: Debt Ceiling, Elections, Gerrymandering, GOP, Ohio Politics, Redistricting, Stan Collender, ThinkProgress

Sep 17 2012

Mike Curtin on Why Ohio Needs Redistricting Reform

Mike Curtin, former newsman and vice chairman of the Columbus Dispatch is well known to Central Ohioans who follow public events and politics. In his 38-year career in journalism moving from public affairs reporter up through the editorial ranks to eventually run the Dispatch, Curtin is viewed by most as a fair and balanced observer of Ohio politics. Now a candidate for the Ohio House, Curtin is talking about the winner takes all approach Ohio has to congressional and state legislative district apportionment saying that in this “hyper-partisan age” something needs to be done to take all of the power out of the hands of whichever party controls the Statehouse. “If you look at the maps – any of the maps – they’re absurdities,” Curtin told Colleen Marshall on The Spectrum. Curtin used his own community as an example. He lives in the village of Marble Cliff which for 70 years has been a sister community with Grandview Heights – sharing schools, municipal services and a library district. The two communities are contiguous, but not on legislative district maps, and Curtin says this is simply a twisted mathematical construct to benefit the people currently in power in Columbus in Washington. “They (current district maps) are geographical monsters that serve only the politicians in power,” Curtin said. Ohioans have an alternative, however. It’s State Issue 2 and it will be on the ballot this November. Innovation Ohio supports a yes vote on Issue 2 and we’ll be talking more about it over the next six weeks. Check out Curtin’s entire interview (3 minutes):

Written by ronsylvester · Categorized: Fair and Open Elections, Innovation Station · Tagged: Mike Curtin, Ohio Issue 2, Ohio Politics, Redistricting

Stay informed about key issues and bills.

Sign Up

We monitor Ohio politicians to help you hold them accountable.

  • About Us
  • Our Team
  • Our Work
  • The Latest
  • IO in the News
  • Take Action
  • Donate
Innovation Ohio

360 S. 3rd Street, 3rd Floor, Columbus, OH 43215
614-220-0150
info@innovationohio.org

© Innovation Ohio 2020